1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system, a method, an apparatus and a program for providing an electronic manual, and particularly relates to a system, a method, an apparatus and a program for providing an electronic manual that can automatically select an electronic manual for a product which a user uses and provide the electronic manual to the user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Instead of the conventional paper based manuals (describing how to use a product or cautions), electronically written manuals (hereinafter, referred to as “electronic manual”) have been used widely in view of circumstances wherein contents is getting larger in accordance with improvement of the products' performance, or demands for saving papers.
The electronic manuals are advantageous over paper based manuals. For example, it is able to distribute it via communications networks, such as the Internet, or it is easy to edit the contents.
However, in a case where electronic manuals for many products are provided through a web site, it is difficult for a user to find out a target manual instantly.
Some of electric apparatuses have display units to display electronic manuals, and the electronic manuals usually include “Trouble Shooting” for quick recovery from troubles. However, if the electric apparatus has troubles on its display unit, a user can not refer to the trouble shooting.
In a case where a user upgrades a product, the upgraded product and the former one usually share the same or similar functions. In such the case, it is troublesome for the user to find out necessary article to learn characteristic functions of the upgraded product from a full version manual.
A person who plans to buy a product, usually compares catalogs of picked-up products. Since most of such the catalogs merely present features of the products, it is difficult to imagine handling or usability of the product. In such the situation, the manual is useful to learn how to handle the product. But unfortunately, most of the manuals are unavailable before the user actually buys the product. That is, it is difficult to previously study usability of the picked-up products.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above circumstances, and it is an object of the present invention to provide a system, a method, an apparatus, and a program for providing an electronic manual by which an electronic manual of a product being used by a customer is automatically selected and provided.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a system, a method, an apparatus, and a program for providing an electronic manual by which an electronic manual describing functional differences between target products.